By MARTY LEVINE

Editor’s note: The University Times is writing a series on the most recent winners of the Chancellor’s Distinguished Service Awards for Staff. This is the third installment.

University Engagement Award winner: Suzanne Lynch, business administration manager, University Center for Teaching and Learning

Suzanne Lynch joined Staff Council 10 years ago just to meet new Pitt people and see more of what was happening here, outside of her day-to-day job.

“I just wanted to get involved,” she said, attending meetings and volunteering where she could. In 2022, she said, “that just grew when I got to be a mom. I was passionate about getting more resources for working parents at Pitt.”

For several years, Lynch worked with other Staff Council members on passing a lactation resources resolution through Staff Council, and just a short while ago that finally turned into a Pitt policy charter that is working its way toward implementation.

Today Lynch is an active member of the Pitt Parenting Community group and will serve on the lactation policy committee. “A lot of doors opened,” she says, “and I owe that to Staff Council.”

She is the group’s current representative on the University Planning and Budgeting Committee and the Board of Trustees’ Finance Committee. “I see how my day-to-day work connects to the bigger picture at Pitt” from these experiences, as well as understanding better the overall impact the University has. All of that “has been really cool for me. I think I have learned and grown from just being in those spaces.

“Through this experience I’ve learned so much about shared governance and how important it is,” Lynch adds. ‘We are one university even though we do different jobs and we are all working toward the same goal.”

Most recently she was elected Staff Council’s vice president for finance. She suggests others should expand their Pitt experience, as she has: Go to the Board of Trustees’ open meetings;  ask questions at the chancellor’s town halls. “With shared governance, we have the opportunity to share our voice and we should take advantage of that.”

Innovation in Advancing Administrative and Operational Efficiency Award winner: Heather Lego, director of quality and organizational excellence, Pitt Digital

Heather Lego’s work today is all about trying to make “business processes” easier and eliminating wasted time and effort, so that Pitt departments and units can get things done —  especially dealing with masses of data — more efficiently. And these “business processes” encompass a lot of things in many different offices: everything from submitting your clearances so that you can work in a laboratory to handling a donor’s gift check and complying with the donor’s wishes. She works with the chief financial officer’s unit, the provost’s office, the sponsored projects office, and too many others to name. This has involved “lots of great partnerships,” Lego says.

“They have a problem and I like to help,” she adds. First, she learns the current process, then takes it back to the Pitt Digital team, where they decide together what tools to use to help.

“There’s nothing I do on my own,” she cautions. “I ask a lot of questions of a lot of people. And there’s a whole team that works on every business process improvement project.”

Her most recent project was reforming — really re-forming — how the sponsored projects office handles post-award accounting for research grants. It fully automated the previously manual processing of more than 1,000 invoices a month, saving hundreds of hours of time, Lego says, taking away a lot of “pain points in our current system.”

And sometimes it’s not technology that’s needed to affect the change, she adds. Sometimes an office needs to shift other parts of the business process. Lego has been a part of a lot of such changes in her 26 years at Pitt.

“To me, it’s just what I do and what I love doing,” she says of the work that earned her this award. “I love getting into a process and helping people.”

Marty Levine is a staff writer for the University Times. Reach him at martyl@pitt.edu or 412-758-4859.

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